Overcome B2B Deliverability Challenges
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Understand the triggers for common business-to-business (B2B) delivery failures.
- Identify some of the behaviors associated with sending B2B.
- Learn the best practices to aid successful deliverability to business domains.
What Is B2B Deliverability?
Business-to-business deliverability refers to your ability to send email successfully to other businesses, institutions, or organizational-specific email domains and their inboxes. For example, a company called My Business would have the top-level business domain of @mybusiness.co.uk.
Common Problems with B2B Delivery
Internal Mail Policies and Security Settings
Business domains often bring their own unique deliverability challenges compared to free mail provider domains. Email delivery success can be influenced by the strictness of internal policy settings set by server administrators, in addition to the email security software used to manage corporate email delivery.
So it’s important for any email marketer to be mindful that business security is prioritized above all. Internal policies, filters, and security settings are a necessary means to help protect those businesses and its employees from spam, viruses, and potential malicious email attacks, like phishing.
This can mean there are subtle changes in email behaviors and performance reporting. For example, some of these sophisticated anti-spam filters could distort open and click tracking results. They’re known to scan and click links in your emails to verify that they don’t redirect to malicious sites or content. Or in other cases, they can block tracking pixels completely. This can make it more difficult to track direct user action and engagement.
There are variable policies and security settings in place across businesses today. And email service providers (ESPs) have unique sending architecture and mail server settings. So it’s inevitable that sending to some businesses and institutions can be problematic at first attempt.
For example, .edu or .mil domains are notoriously more difficult to mail. They want to keep out commercial mail and have stricter protocols in place to protect their sensitivity. It’s normal to experience isolated delays in time to delivery, unexpected bounces, or even outright blocks when sending to some B2B domains.
In many cases, adjusting things like volume, message throughput, and SMTP connections can help improve or even stabilize your deliveries. But this is not always enough to achieve desired delivery results. In more extreme cases—without being able to contact the business employee or server administrator directly to help create an allowlist for the sending domain and/or IPs—you may not always be able to reach the intended recipient via email. For those edge cases, you should consider alternative channels of communication to reach your contact such as SMS or Push.
List Acquisition Methods
A common theme in B2B email marketing is the need to acquire and generate new leads through various external sources including in-person events, point of sale, and web sign-up forms. There’s nothing wrong with any of those approaches. But the robustness of those list collection methods and the processes and efforts taken to ensure that quality lead and email address data is captured and consented to is vital. This approach helps to build the foundation for email deliverability success (in terms of permission, subscriber expectations, and data quality).
Buying or Renting Email Lists
The darkest arts of email acquisition data are those obtained without consent, including purchasing or renting. This is strictly prohibited and frowned upon for good reason. You simply cannot verify the source of that data nor is it possible to verify the quality of the data received (spam traps alert!). And, more importantly, you don't have explicit permission from the contact.
These methods always lead to severe deliverability issues with guaranteed high bounce rates, spam complaints, spam traps—and ultimately a collective set of negative data signals that leads to blocklisting of your domain/IPs and damage to your entire email marketing program. Don’t jeopardize your ability to send emails for the sake of trying to grow a sizable list. Avoid these practices!
The Rise of Google Workspace and Outlook 365
Some of the most common business software and filtering providers in use today include Mimecast, Barracuda, and Proofpoint. There’s also a rise in the adoption of former B2C-exclusive email providers competing in the B2B space, such as Google Workspace and Outlook 365.
Google and Microsoft apply the same filtering engine used in their consumer mail as they do with their business mail. This doesn’t always mean the same end result because other factors are involved. But it stands to reason that if you have an excellent reputation with Gmail and Outlook consumer mail, you’re more likely to see your emails delivered to their business mail too.
How to Improve Delivery to B2B Domains
Business filters are known to place greater emphasis on content and link quality—so it’s important to check the reputation of any third-party links and hosted assets. Avoid things like URL shorteners, which can also cause mail to be filtered.
To help protect your brand and reputation as a sender, also avoid practices such as acquiring lists through unverified means and cold emailing. These methods lead to high spam traps, spam complaints, bounces, and blocks that are detrimental to your deliverability.
Deliverability fundamentals based around sound authentication, clean data, and relevant content remain important in achieving success in the B2B realm within B2C. But there are additional challenges presented by unique business filters—a higher potential for distorted open and click metrics and wider delivery issues in general.
By taking a proactive approach to the monitoring of your email performance KPIs and using out-of-the-box Intelligence Reports with Marketing Cloud Engagement, you can identify problem areas quickly and help optimize your B2B performance where it’s needed.
Resources